Chapter 8 #2
“For a long time, he was bigger than me,” Zachary said, with a smile that hurt his mouth a little.
“But believe me, I didn’t tolerate it. I got my ass kicked.
A lot.” He shook his head, not a fan of all those memories.
“Then I started taking a boxing class in high school. That got me hitting the weight room, too. Suddenly, I went from a scrawny kid to the makings of a man, and that did not go down well with Pete.”
“I wouldn’t think so,” Romily said.
She wasn’t looking around anymore. She was looking at him. Only at him, and when she reached over to rest her hand on his leg, he felt something in him almost… ease at that.
It was the strangest sensation. Zachary couldn’t remember the last time a woman had tried to soothe him.
He liked it, though it felt strange and marvelous and a lot like he was on a kind of verge again, only this time he wasn’t sure he really knew what was on the other side.
That was new, too.
The only thing to do was to keep going, so that was what he did. “One night my senior year, Pete got good and liquored up and actually challenged me. By that point he’d been dancing around that for a while, but that night he was ready. He jumped me when I walked in the door.”
Zachary remembered the confusion. The chaos.
How long it felt like it took him to respond when it was likely only a few seconds.
“My mother was screaming. I knew the last thing she wanted was for me to fight him, but I was done. I was eighteen. Truth was, I thought I was pretty tough. So I beat the hell out of him, and I’m not going to lie to you, Romily.
I enjoyed it. I threw him out the front door and I tossed his shit out behind him. ”
“That seems like a fitting ending,” Romily said fiercely.
He smiled at her and reached over to run his fingers down her cheek, over her lips. So he could get a little that of that gold he could see in her eyes into his bloodstream somehow.
“It would have been, but it wasn’t the end,” he said. “A couple of weeks later, he turned up again, but this time he didn’t come for me. He went for my mother. Beat her unconscious.”
Zachary still remembered pulling up to the house in that piece of shit beater he’d been so proud of, because it was his. He’d bought it used, but he’d bought it himself. He remembered frowning at the side door because it wasn’t set right, there against the house.
He’d been halfway to the house before he realized it was because the door had been half-torn off its hinges.
And he’d known. Immediately. He’d known exactly what had happened.
Just like he knew that it was his fault.
“When I got home that night I found her broken on the floor in pool of her own blood,” he told Romily, and this part was harder.
But there was no stopping now. “I knew exactly who did it, of course, so after I took my mother to the hospital, I went looking for Pete in the crap bar he liked to hang out in with his degenerate friends.”
Romily leaned a little closer. Zachary shook his head, and blew out a breath.
“He was waiting for me. He came at me with a tire iron. I got it away from him and when he made a move toward me the next time, I swung it.”
It had been so many years now. It was a matter of public record. Still, this was Romily. He realized in that moment—or maybe he’d been dreading this moment because he’d always known—that this really could be the thing that pushed her away from him forever —
But wasn’t that the point? Wasn’t that what he was always trying to tell her?
If they couldn’t be honest with each other, what were they doing?
Nothing, was the answer. Just playing games to get off and calling it something more profound than it was.
There was nothing wrong with that. Zachary knew all kinds of people who liked this kind of lifestyle as a kind of spicy topping on their otherwise vanilla lives.
He thought that was great. For them.
But deep down, he’d always believed—he’d always hoped— that there was more.
Romily was the only one who had allowed him to see that it could happen. That they could make it real. If it required this level of honest vulnerability, surely that was a small price to pay.
Except it didn’t feel small.
And he could acknowledge that it was probably a good thing that his arrogant ass was getting to experience this. It was humbling as shit.
He’d have to remember that the next time she got avoidant during a punishment or pinched herself because she wanted to spark one. Not that he’d change a single thing he did, but he’d remember. He’d sympathize.
Knowing him, he’d make sure to use it against her when it suited him, too.
But first he had to do this, even if she decided she was done with him.
“I hit him hard,” Zachary told her, harder than necessary, because he had to get it out. “Probably broke his arm. But he also stumbled back and hit his head on the corner of the building. Too hard. It was concrete. He was dead within minutes.”
He waited, trying not to tense, but Romily didn’t take her hand away from his body. She was still watching him like she was waiting for the next part of the story. She hadn’t recoiled.
A moment passed and if anything, she moved closer again.
Zachary felt a kind of tectonic shift inside him, like old fault lines disappearing. He’d told this story too many times to count. He’d never stalled or stuttered.
He’d also never cared what the person listening to this story thought of it. Or of him.
“I went to prison on a manslaughter charge,” he told her, and it wasn’t as hard to say.
“I got five years, got out three. When I got out, I got to see my mom again. She’ll never be the same after that night.
She walks with a cane. Her speech is distorted.
” He glanced over toward the passenger seat.
“She wants to love me because I’m her son, but when it comes down to it, she doesn’t forgive me.
She can’t. Because at the end of the day I killed the man she loved. We both have to live with that.”
“The man she loved was a monster,” Romily whispered.
“To my mother, I’m the monster,” Zachary replied, and he felt steadier by the moment.
“And I accept that. There are some consequences that you can’t come back from.
I don’t regret killing Pete. I wish I did because I figure that would make me a better human being.
When I think about him, I only ever wish I could have gotten rid of him sooner.
I don’t regret that either. The only thing I do regret is that I made my mother unhappy. ”
“I think,” Romily said quietly, and after a moment of quiet with only the sounds his car made between them, “that your mother is afraid to thank you for what you did, or even acknowledge it, because it then she’d also have to acknowledge what happened to her.”
Zachary felt that as if she reached into his chest, wrapped pretty fingers around his heart, and yanked it out.
For a long moment he couldn’t speak. He followed the winding road around and around, until he pulled into the driveway he’d been aiming for. The driveway he could find in his sleep. Once he parked, however, he had to take a minute.
“I want you to meet her,” he told her. Maybe he meant that he needed her to, but that was feeling a lot like the same thing right now. “She’s part of me no matter how she feels about any of this.”
“Of course I want to meet your mother,” Romily replied.
Though there was something new in those gold eyes of hers. A kind of wariness, but he’d expected that—just directed more at him and what he’d done and less toward his mother, who he’d always seen as a victim in all of this. Maybe the only victim.
He was going to have to think about that.
In the meantime, it was something to usher this woman into the house where he’d grown up, though he didn’t remember a time that he’d ever really been a kid. A place where so many terrible things that happened. Some by his own hand.
It was something to watch Romily sit and talk with his mother, who still couldn’t look Zachary in the eyes.
“It was so nice to meet you,” Romily said when they stood up to leave.
Zachary watched his mother’s eyes flash with that old fury. She could never quite mask it. It reminded him of the fights she’d started here. The way she’d poked and prodded Pete, never leaving well enough alone, like she wanted the explosion more than she wanted peace.
He hadn’t remembered that part in a long time either.
“Zachary always did like a project,” his mother told Romily. There was even more of that temper on her face, then. “Careful, though. He doesn’t like to solve his puzzles. He likes to smash them.”
“See you next week, Mom,” Zachary said, without giving her a reaction. He knew that was what she wanted.
He wasn’t particularly surprised that the ride back down that hill was silent.
“Did… what happened to her make her mean?” Romily asked hesitantly.
“Sometimes I like to tell myself that I did,” Zachary said, because that’s what he would have said a week ago. But everything felt different now. Even this. “The fact of the matter is, she’s always been as toxic as Pete was. Just less violent.”
“Yet you see her every week.”
“I bought that house. I didn’t buy it for me. I wouldn’t live there again if you paid me.” He glanced at her, but she was looking out the front window. “When I got out of prison and made some money, this was the only amend that I could make. The only one that she’d accept.”
They rode across the Golden Gate Bridge, the famous deep red metal stretching above them and the Bay its usual glory on all sides. There were boats out, and the bayside towns gleaming pretty in the distance. San Francisco gleamed like a jewel ahead of them.
“I know why she said what she did about puzzles,” Romily said, as if she was being careful with her words. “But why did she say I was a project?”
“My mother is under the impression that I like broken things,” he told her, matter-of-factly. “Broken women, especially.”
She sat up straighter. “Is that true?”
Zachary considered that for a moment. Or rather, he considered how to say what he wanted to say to her.
“Not really,” he said after he’d thought about it.
“I don’t like random broken things. Sometimes, when I meet a woman who has some stuff going on in her life, I think I can fix it.
I’m pretty sure that’s just part of who I am.
My mother only sees the bossiness. I’ll even admit to arrogant.
She liked to call it my savior complex .
But it’s not a compulsion. It’s individual.
And there’s usually a deeper element than that. ”
“So what you’re saying,” Romily said quietly, “is that you fix a number of broken women. That it’s a habit. Not a compulsion, but… common. For you.”
“No,” he said, and it was a challenge to keep his voice steady and calm, “I’m not saying that.
Because there are some kinds of broken that can’t be fixed.
Not by me. Not by my magical cock. Not by my demands, my kinks, or anything I have to give.
For a long time, I got entirely too involved with that kind of broken. ”
“Zachary,” Romily said, and she sounded almost frantic, though her golden eyes were steady when she looked at him. “I don’t want to be one of your projects. Some puzzle you solve and then smash.”
“You’re not fucking broken,” he threw back at her.
They were somewhere in San Francisco. He didn’t care where. He pulled the car over to the side of the road—even though it was steep and now it was almost as if they were lying down, or stalled going up one side of a roller-coaster.
Probably a decent analogy, but that didn’t stop him.
He turned to look at her across the center console.
“Have you been through some shit? Clearly. But nothing about you is broken, Romily. You’re strong as hell.
You’re tough. Not only that, you’re not fucking selfish like every single person we’ve just been talking about.
Pete. My mother. The so-called projects she was referring to.
Every single one of them was and is completely self-centered. That’s not you.”
“I don’t know how you think —”
But he needed her to listen to him. “Believe me, I’ve met entirely too many women who look at a man with my particular obsessions and think that all they have to do is lie around and come their faces off.
And yeah, that’s fun. That’s what the Club app is for.
But this?” He moved his finger between them.
“This is real, Romily. You don’t just follow my commands so that you get off.
We’re in this together and that’s what it’s supposed to be like.
That’s how I’ve always thought it ought to be between two people like us.
A give and take, though that’s not always simple.
Today I was telling you stories you tried to soothe me.
Take care of me.” He leaned in a little bit closer.
“No one ever does that. Ever. I’m supposed to be in control of everything. ”
“What if I think I’m broken?” she whispered.
He reached over and put his hands around her face. “Baby, you might have been trampled on a little bit. It happens to all of us. But you’re not broken. Look at you. You shine so bright and you give so much, it shouldn’t be possible. Yet here you are.”
“I don’t know what I want,” she told him then in the same rough whisper. “I don’t like thinking that I’m not special to you, but at the same time?—”
“Romily,” he said, very deliberately, “I haven’t introduced a woman to my mother in too many years to count.
If you’re a project for me, you’re the kind of project I intend to be working on for the rest of my life.
” She sucked in a breath at that and he nodded.
“Are you beginning to understand where I’m coming from here?
I’ve already broken every rule I have for you. ”
“I didn’t ask you to do that,” she said, her eyes wide.
“You didn’t have to ask me to do that. I wanted to do that. I want you more than I’ve ever wanted those rules.” He stroked the sides of her face. “I want this. I want us.”
“Zachary.” And he was sure that he could see tears glimmering there in her eyes. “There are so many things that you don’t know about me.”
“No shit,” he retorted. “And I’m never going to know, little bird. Unless you tell me. Are you ready for that? I just stripped myself naked in every way possible and showed you everything there is to see. All of me. Can you give me that in return?”